Sunday, February 04, 2007

You have got to be kidding me

By Heraclitus

Via
Lily, I read this little nugget of truly glorious news:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

The UN report was written by international experts and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft last year and invited to comment.

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.

I wish I could come up with some kind of snappy ending, but I'm overwhelmed by a mixture of disbelief and anger.

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2 Comments:

  • Disbelief? This is exactly how they operate.

    By Blogger Michael J.W. Stickings, at 11:36 PM  

  • That's how everything operates. It's hard to think of any item of information disbursed to the public that isn't influenced by someone with a financial interest. When you hear that cigarettes don't cause cancer, the universe is 6000 years old, Cannabis does brain damage, you need to drink 8 bottles of water every day, there isn't enough evidence for global warming,we're making progress in Iraq or that Barak Obama is a Muslim extremist, you're hearing money talk.

    By Blogger Capt. Fogg, at 10:01 AM  

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